The challenge about marketing output is that it’s not always numbers based and the ROI isn’t immediate. With that being said I think it can be and here’s how I would solve how to find and how to know if someone is good.

How to find?

• Look for advertising, marketing tactics or things you like and look backwards to see which marketer did them.
• Look back into your own community / customers / users to see if there is anyone who gets it. I find this most helpful.
• Look at specific companies you admire and check LinkedIn for their marketing folks.

Those have been my best ways of finding marketing people. Word of caution: most marketers suck.

How to know if they are good?

• They Love your product. I did at Mint so marketing was easy.
• Objective based. Easiest way to test someone on marketing is give them a challenge and see if they ask whats the objective. Most will just start rambling bullshit or ideas. Others will start with what do we want this to accomplish. I like them.
• Metrics. I personally like people that can quantify and prove what they are doing is backing out to numbers.
• Personality. This is general but just want to say it.
• Relevance. If they are already in your industry it’s a bonus cause they’ll have the connections, it’s ideal, not required.

Here’s a test I gave someone to help run AppSumo, has a few marketing related questions and ideas to see how people think through things.

One of my fav questions for marketing is just giving them limited budget questions and a # of people to reach. See what they come up with, hear their thought process and if they provide #s related to their decisions.

Hope this helps.

Then why may they lose in the next 5 years.

“What you talkin about Noah?“

I was scootering down the streets of Florence a few months ago and I thought I saw a company sign that said they solve problems. Imagine a business where I could call up and say I have a problem, will you please get me flowers by 10am tomorrow. Bamn, done.

I thought a bit further about how Craigslist has tons of people looking for work, heck I found an unemployed guy to come over and help me move my things in exchange for $10 and my left over beer. The more I worked through the scenario the more I realized that Craigslist was not ideal.

Why?

The same reason you aren’t buying your things off of eBay anymore. You want more.

You want consistency, clear expectations and frankly less bullshit.

The evolution looks something like this:

Internet was born

eBay helped you get rid of all this extra crap you had lying around. Wow, they have no inventory, take a cut of everything and millions of people are making all this extra money. Boom. Success.

Next, we have Amazon. At first you were for my friend’s dad who was an early adopter engineer, then I graduated college and I bought that book from you since it was a few bucks cheaper than Barnes & Nobles. Recently, I am older and you launched Prime and I am just a pawn in your game. Put it out there and I’ll give you my dollars. I’m easy.

Anyways, the evolution follows how people want things to be easy and predictable. The same reason I sell all my stuff on Amazon Marketplace. I put my upc in and I get a sell quickly. No hassle, no community uproar over another fee, no 18 fields to input my ipod. Same with buying, I just find it, hit go and you have it on my doorstep in 2 days.

People want more. They can’t just have autonomous experiences each time with your product.

Back to Craigslist. Let’s say I want someone to help solve a problem of mine. I post it on CL. Get tons of shit responses, wade through them and maybe that person flakes.

So with Craigslist slipping new companies are picking off pieces like a Lion on a Zebra carcass.

Here’s the companies picking off the slivers of Craigslist:

Gigs => TaskRabbit
Activites => Skyara
Housing => AirBnB
For Sale => eggcartel
Tickets => Ticketfly
Gift Cards => CardPool
Casual Encounters => Speed Date

The list can go on of the pieces that are still available, Cars, Jobs, Discussions, etc…

Ultimately, these services provide you consistency and accountability. I know what I’m getting.

I know what you are thinking. Yes, Craigslist is free and very easy to use. I don’t think it will ever go away but I do think CL at times costs you more in time and money. Also, there is no value created over time while using the site. For instance, having you (as a seller) prefer me more due to my many successful CL purchases vs. the 50 other people who email to rent your apartment.

To me at this point in my life it is worth the few dollars in service fees to start using services that save me time and headaches.

Unless Craigslist adapts to how people are preferring to use internet services as the internet grows up I see a huge downfall in their business.

I realized I need a way to make decisions about whether that’s a good deal or not.

Here’s the spreadsheet I used based on their data. I figured you could use it as well in deciding which ad campaigns are the best for you.

Get it for yourself.

Key things to always ask when doing your advertising.

• What is the ctr of the ads?
• What is the unique visitor to impression ratio? 100,000 impressions doesn’t mean 100,000 saw it.

Here’s the list. Hope it helps.

1- What’s your expertise?

2- What do you do outside of work? Personal questions to see if you like them.

3- How much do you cost? Are you able to defer fees?

4- What relationships do you have that could be beneficial to us?

5- What companies similar to us do you represent? Can you intro me to X?

6- Who would you use if you were looking for a lawyer / law firm?

7- What are the most useful questions to ask when choosing a law firm?

Any others you like?

What is this form?

It is the form your employees will love to hate. I know I did.

It makes people accountable? Shit, you mean I have to do that work? Yea.

Anyway, this is a form I started using and try to give to everyone I work with.

Why use it? It accomplishes a few things:

1- Helps prioritize to the person the things they should be accomplishing

2- Makes them submit everyday the work they did and shows if it’s along the lines of what you want

3- Allows you to graph their progress if you ask for a lot of #s

This can be customized for: sales people, data-entry roles and anything you want to see progress / results on.

Here’s a live sample of a form I give to our marketing person:

See the live results on Google docs

Downloadable copy for you to play with:
Daily Accountability – Marketing Metrics

Ps. This still works even if you are a solopreneur.

Want more? Follow me on Twitter

I initially saw Mint with Aaron Patzer and Dave McClure in November/December of 2006. Instantly, I was in love. It was a unique approach to a massive problem and Aaron already had a working prototype. Note: Aaron spent the previous 6 months building it alone in his apartment. Most people never realize there were way more competitors than just Wesabe: Geezeo, Buxfer, Yodlee (data-aggregation company used by Mint), Quicken Online, MS Money online and a few others I can’t remember.

Here is Mint’s initial version:

So what did it take for Mint to win?

1. Instant Value. This is easily the most important thing. All the other solutions required work. Facebook was our secret weapon that trained people to share their personal information online. Thanks Zuck. Within 3 minutes of using Mint you get your full financial picture and ways to increase your own money. All for free. Basically, too good to be true. No other service came close to doing this.

2. Name. Next to family and health, personal finance it is one of the top 3 most sensitive things in life. The site was originally called mymint.com. I was initially against buying Mint.com but Aaron / Anton spent months acquiring the domain. This may seem inconsequential, but would you feel more comfortable entering your bank details on Wesabe.com or Mint.com?

The idea that we could buy / use that domain showed people we had money and aren’t as likely to just steal their information. The shortness of the domain in and of itself [chase.com, mint.com] signals legitimacy. Think about companies adding ‘as seen on tv’ stickers to their boxes. Shows they had the money to buy the tv spots.

3. Trust / Design. This goes along with the name. This seems to be discounted but sometimes I talk about Mint as a design / marketing company whose product is personal finance. Think of Zappos as a Customer Support company that happens to sell shoes. Jason’s clean design style helped make users feel comfortable with giving Mint their financial information. I’ll cover this in more detail another time, but for now here’s a few key things we did to increase trust:

• SEO. People trust Google, so we knew they’d trust us more if they came to Mint from there, so we used search engine optimization to get Mint to the front page of Google searches.
• Authority. We got thought leaders in personal finance to back us.
• Security. We actually promoted security front and center.

To drive this point on design & trust home, compare these 2 sites (names removed) and tell me which one makes you warm and fuzzy about sharing your financial data.

If you want a contemporary reference, it would be something like this “Hello, ladies, look at your man, now back to Mint, now back at your man, now back to Mint. Sadly, he isn’t Mint, but if he stopped using ladies scented body wash and switched to Old Spice, he could smell like he’s Mint.”

4. Investors. Aaron is one of the most strategic people I know and was able to bring on the who’s who of investors. Those people had deep connections anywhere we needed it. For example: one of the leaders of Quicken, the guy who invented Gmail, and many more…

How did he do it? Good question. He wasn’t a Silicon Valley insider (he’s from the midwest) and he didn’t pitch these guys right away. Aaron built a functional prototype for 6 months and then hit the streets. He picked investors based on their industry experiences relevant to Mint.

5. Research. Aaron’s father has research experience and we spent countless weeks figuring out what people really wanted before we ever launched our beta. Guess who we found out Mint’s biggest competitor was? No one. Apathy. This shocked me! Most people would rather not track anything and just see how they are doing when they go to the ATM. Guess who was #2? Ms Money, Intuit, Wesabe? NOPE. Microsoft Excel. Who would have believed that!

Learning about all this provided us with the messaging / approach and branding to appeal to the right audience. This affected our messaging, internally and externally we were similar to Firefox in saying “take back your money.”

6. “Lean”-Startup. Mint was well-funded and definitely took its time to launch. 1.5 years. Think of how it was to be the marketer of that (:

I am a fan of validation through research – approaching people at cafes, user testing in person, surveys, segmentation and interviews – which Mint did way beyond any quick-to-launch first movers.

There are times when getting your product out there before it’s ready can hurt you; first mover advantage may not apply to a market where the product needs to convey trust. Would you give your credit card to someone who was caught cheating?

Could Mint have won if they hadn’t raised $15+ million dollars? I don’t think so. Where did the money go? Yodlee is not cheap. Hiring the best people. Endless supply of ping-pong balls add up.

Why did it need so much money? Dealing with Yodlee seems trivial but we had dedicated engineers, and securing data is not cheap! We also spent a lot on design, and we made sure we got the product right. How did we know the product was right? That’s for another blog post. 1.5 years to launch.

Did Aaron need to take 1.5 years to launch the product? It’s hard to say about right vs. wrong but when looking at the outcome it doesn’t seem horrible.

7. Education. Dave had a the killer idea of the content network (blog) which was a HUGE traffic generator and still is to this day. It provides infographics, ideas, interviews and a wealth of useful information to users (and Google for SEO juice). The development took way longer than anyone expected so we had the time to focus. Most startups won’t have this luxury. This got us loyal followers, connections to other relevant bloggers and learnings of what keywords people are using when talking about personal finance. More recently, Stew Langille has done an amazing job creating tons of rich content & infographics in the blog and well executed landing pages.

8. PR / word-of-mouth. I get ultra-annoyed when people refer to things as viral. Mint got its inital public buzz and discussion because it won TC40. Beyond that Mint built a useful product, that tons of people wanted and was completely free, makes it easy for people to want to tell their friends about. Then Atomic PR (and their $15k+ month retainer) helped take Mint out to the mainstream press (Walt Mossberg, Good Morning America, The NY Times, etc…). We cared less about the web 2.0 crowd and more about Aaron’s family & friends form the mid-west. Guess what? They still read newspapers in physical form.

Managing your finances effortlessly (and free) was a very appealing story compared to chatter and manual input. Also, most users don’t want to install a plugin to then connect to their personal finance sites (required on Wesabe).

9. Right place, wrong community. Wesabe provided a phone # to call their CEO (great idea), was involved in all things web 2.0 but I believe missed looking to middle Americans who are the struggling the most with finances. Personal finance is an extremely private thing. Personally, I couldn’t care less about your money. I just want to know how I can protect and grow my own. Wesabe was all about forum / chats / comments about money while MInt is a entirely private experience.

10. Community. We spent a ton of time holding online chats, went to events (like twiistup la, finnovate) and connected with the entire personal finance community. Oh yea, this was 9 months before we even launched the product.

Think about this. By the time Mint launched we had more traffic than all the other personal finance sites (buxfer, geezeo, wesabe) combined. Huh? Yea, thanks to its design, 4th-mover (or later) advantage and actively seeking promotion, Mint won.

Bonus: Look how Mint responds to Wesabe shutting down. Ha!

You should follow me on Twitter.

Thanks to Jason Baptiste and Matt Wensing, Brad and Allen for reviewing.

Please leave comments on Hacker News.

via flickr

1. The most critical thing of a successful event is making it NOT suck. I know that sounds easy but it’s about getting valuable speakers and providing a great forum for relevant people to connect. With CommunityNext we never even realized how much we made until the event was over. Our priority was for everyone to LOVE what we put on. That’s why we got Threadless, PlentyOfFish, Fark and other people to the valley that aren’t considered regulars. We also paid extra for open bars before this is now common. Lastly, we got the best food. People remember that and Kahlua cabbage is SO good!
2. Focus on a core group of people and get to break-even ASAFUCKINGp. These people who have over 500 followers on Twitter with a 2/1 follower (>500) / following( <250) ratio. Once I got there I was set. This means that people will start saying to each other “oh, you going.” “oh yea,” And ones who aren’t going will feel left out.
3. Mailing lists are GOLD. We got on http://thestartupdigest.com and some VC associate mailing lists which were giant. Try to attract people who can expense it, easier for them to make purchasing decision. Teacher conferences must be tough:)
4. Partner with women2.org. A great audience of potential attendees.
5. DON’T SHIT your pants if you have only sold 15 tickets and there are 2 weeks left. If your event sucks well maybe you should. Otherwise 80% of sales come in the last 2 weeks of an event.
6. Think of hitting up vc associates. They love this shit, have great expense accounts and can promote to the companies they have in portfolio.
7. Going back to #1. Really need your core locked. That is around 20-40 people who either got free or discounted tickets.
8. Hit up Dave McClure and other people who have events, Charles Hudson, Cassie Philips & sfbeta. They are the godfathers of events in the bay area, they can help you promote via their lists or provide suggestions.
9. Post your event in the generic bitch places, you get 1-2 sales from them, ie. Craigslist posting, yahoo upcoming, plancast & facebook event.
10. You need to enable tracking links in Eventbrite, http://noahsevent-FACEBOOKTRACKING.eventbrite.com so you can see where your sales are coming from.
11. Leverage people who already bought. Give them 1/2 off for 1 friend. Always ask people how they hear about your event and why they are going?
12. Realize 99.99999999999999999999999999% of events are networking. This totally surprised me as I wanted to learn great things. The speakers and price just help filter the types of people who will come. It’s hard to encourage it but alcohol is an amazing social lubricant and try to do fun things with nametags.
13. You should discount your early bird around enough that selling 10-15% of capacity will get you to break-even. With Community Next I preferred keeping prices low and raising over time when demand rices. Although, one strategy that worked in our later events is keep prices high so people think it’s high value but give out coupons to get to break-even in the beginning.
14. Add SnapABug to your site, at a $300 price point for tickets either hiring someone at $15 / hour or doing it yourself is a very good ROI
15. Consider a twitter RT free ticket thingy. Seed with 1-3 key people in your area or target market. Give them 1 ticket to give away for followers retweeting. Should help sell 10-20 tickets.
16. Ask questions. We found some really good sales by asking on Linkedin Answers. Try on quora.com now too..
17. Do a freebie. This one for business on software worked well. What worked well for CommunityNext was having 1 open slot during the day and letting users vote on it. Ie. User’s choice panel. We actually had someone cheat so watch out for that too.
18. Buy google & fb ads. Try reddit ones for geekier events. At our $300 price point we bought on the names of speakers / companies, surprised we sold tickets from this manner.
19. Your SUCCESS METRIC of your event is NOT profit but retention for future events. Simple things to improve this: connect people during your events, spend more to have drinks for Free all day long and don’t have sponsors that don’t add value or do cool stuff at your event. A nice thing is also to prep your speakers over the phone to make sure what they are going to say won’t suck.
20. Trade labor for promotion. You inevitably get a few freeloaders who want to help, let them.
21. Enable your people to promote for you. We gave out badges, now you can give people things to tweet and post to Facebook / LinkedIn statuses. Ps. Try encouraging people to promote to LinkedIn groups, don’t think this has been done much.

Ultimately when doing your event you need to think about why you personally want to go and attend. Get that figured out, setup a budget, lock a few speakers down, get your core group and you are good to go!

So here’s what we are going to do:
Leave a comment or tweet to @appsumo on how we can increase our appsumo.com homepage conversion rate. We are going to take our 3 favorites, test them and report back the results. All tweets / Comments must be submitted by Friday 3pm (so we have enough time to test).

If there is an increase in conversion rate we will give the difference to the top person. The other 2 people selected will get a free bundle.

Huh? Yea, we are currently hovering around ~3% conversion rate. If you do a mock up, that makes it easier to choose and do your test as well.

Here’s how the numbers work out:

$250 for a comment is not a bad deal:) Contest ends Friday at 3pm PST, go leave a comment / tweet now.

Disclaimer: There are no disclaimers.

Why are we doing this?

This is helpful to increase our conversion rates going forward. It compounds. So if we increase it to 5%, then it’s always 5% for all future bundles and we can keep increasing that to my personal goal of 10%.

So far we’ve doubled our conversion rate from 1.5 to 3%. Here are a few things we’ve done so far:

Here are some things we changed based on CrazyEgg, SnapABug and general feedback.

• Moved buy now from right to left side



• Changed the share links to social proof since no one was clicking



• Too many people were clicking on our. No Thanks, tell me when the next bundle is so we pushed it down further on the page and removed the background color



• We added a testimonial to show that people like what we are offering.



• Displayed company logos based on which got the most clicks (also on who had most the twitter followers).
• The timer wasn’t prominent so we moved it higher:



• Our conversion on the checkout page is very high (80%+), ie. so we want more clicks. Hence we made more things that made sense clickable to the checkout page, like the timer.



• Peoples mouse movements were in the middle of the page so we moved our buy now buttons there. Learned from Clicktale.com.



• People were confused whether they were getting one or all bundles so we changed the text from buy now to buy all 5 now >



• Removed the tell us what you want and app directory link from the tip. Distracting from what we want users to do, buy.



• Clarified redemption times. Got great feedback using SnapABug.com that people didn’t have a need for the bundle right now. So we realized we could clarify that almost all the services can be redeemed whenever.



• Feedback was that text sucks and images rule. Removed text and updated with images.



• People kept asking if our charge was monthly or one time. we added an faq page.
• Bonus tip! Use google analytics and setup goals. this was AMAZINGLY helpful. you can see the $ per each referral as well as how much $ you make from specific page visits. This will teach you if people to go to your faq then buy or which sites you should try to buy more traffic from.

Thanks Sudhanshu Aggarwal, Jason Baptiste, Ruben Gamez, Gabe Weinberg, Jeff Clark, Jerome Breche and everyone who talked to us for help on this article and optimizing.

Contests ends Friday at 3pm. Go leave a tweet / comment with what we should test, it can be anything.

via flickr

I personally don’t care for people who give advice without some street cred so let me drop my short sales history:

- Transtec, Bay Area based computer consulting company. Taught me the that niche markets make selling much easier.
- Macy’s bed sheets and linens department. Commission based sales against old ladies. Taught me about how waiters are really sales people with aprons.
- OfficeMax, Learned upsells by going for the insurance (where I got a commission). Leading MaxInsurance sales person while I was there. BigTime:)
- IBM job interview, learned about who comes first which is the customer.
- CommunityNext, grew community conference to over 100K in profit in 1 year. Taught me about loving your customer.
- Gambit, virtual currency monetization. Personally grew the sales revenue to 8 figures. Learned about affiliates, tracking and ROI based sales.

Here are my 3 starter rules to be a sales badass.

Rule #1: Sales is not selling, it’s understanding.

I know that sounds weird. The best sales people are educators and love what they are offering. If you don’t like what you are selling or aren’t interested, quit and go find it. It’s a bit SHOCKING to find out the best sales people in companies get paid WAY MORE than the TOP engineer.

Commission has its moments when times are good. Sales to me is not about convincing someone to buy something, it’s about helping them make the best decision for their needs. If it’s your product, then so be it but if not then help them find the right one. That will always win out long-term. One of my KEY indicators of any sales success is repeat buying or loyalty. More on this later.

Rule #2: You can’t be a pussy.

I have noticed most startup sales people are weak in Silicon Valley. You spend countless nights, weekends and hours building an amazing thing only to be timid of telling people about it. One of my favorite sales people interview strategies is to not respond to their first email. Then I see how long and who actually follows up. How far will you go to make it succeed?

Rule #3: You must track it or it didn’t happen.

I’ll show you the forms to use that Nicholas Holland created that increased my sales conversions. Two of the key things of sales are accountability and metrics. Just knowing someone is checking your #s, even when you’re the boss, makes you so much better of a sales person.

Do you want me to write more about sales?

Awesome free iPad apps you may not have heard of:

Airvideo : This is one of my favorites! It is the best way to convert videos to be viewable on your iPad. As well, you can stream from your laptop or an IP address if you have a static one.

Goodnite lite : Simple alarm clock.

Flipboard : I really like the layout, personalization from Facebook / Twitter and easy ability to add new content. A great way to read while you are chilling at a cafe or the airport.

USA Today : A good way to stay connected with what’s going on in the USA.

Weatherbug Elite : Definitely the best way to see the weather of the places you are going on in your trip.

NYT Editors Choice : Super concise reads on business, technology and world news.

What’s The Difference : A recommendation from my buddy Nick Holland is a fun game to bring people together. It’s the same one you played as a kid where things are missing from the images and you have to find them. This is an amazing time killer while you are waiting for your train or a good ice-breaker to meet new people in bars. (No, I have not bought my iPad to a bar…yet)

XE Currency : Helps you figure out how much you are paying with a simple currency exchange rates. Would be useful if they showed graphs to see if things are getting better or worse.

Wikihood : Super useful to find out cool things to do and see around where you are.

Calibre : Not an iPad app but useful for converting any document to be readable on the iPad.

Here are the obvious ones you iPad users already have:

ibook : This is the reason I bought the iPad. Instead of lugging around 3-5 paperbacks and searching for new books in stores I download torrents or borrow ebooks from friends. I also import PDFs I want to read in the future.

Instapaper free : I try not to get distracted while working so I Instapaper most online articles sent or posted on various sites. Only wish there was an Instapaper for video.

Twitterific : A great way to see your mentions and tweets on the go. One thing I’ve found useful is saved searches to easily see keywords with ease.

Honorable Mentions:

Evernote : I’ve had a few bugs with this one but it’s a great way to save directions, places of interest or general notes about the travel.

Any others I missed?